education

i'm cleaning out my old word documents. [a dangerous business that could keep you up far too late on a saturday night laughing at yourself.]

i stumbled onto some of my humanities papers from sophomore year in college. [oh, to be a sophomore in college again! when i could spend evenings on my balcony eating pudding swirled with cool whip and talking about existentialism and mascara.]

i can't stop laughing. and i really feel the need to share this little paragraph with you. [i'm sure if my old students could get their hands on these pretentious snobby meaningless sentences they'd all come screaming back for me to change their grade.]

Animals wander about their natural habitat killing, feeding, and resting as they please, urged on by some primal instinct. Naturalism attempts to carry this metaphor of the natural world over into the seemingly more complicated day-to-day existence of humans. Through this philosophy, the rationality each human believes he or she possesses dissipates into a disparate well of confusion, frustration, determinism, and pessimism. Rational thought is replaced by instinct, and compassion is left mutilated on the battleground of competing economic forces. Eugene O’Neill’s character, Yank, in The Hairy Ape is the quintessential example of such a man lost in his own primal nature. Every action and attempt to grasp hold of sense in the world around him leaves Yank increasingly more confused and dissatisfied with his existence.

the irony is, i have absolutely no recollection of yank or his hairy ape. so much for education.

teeth

i'm married to a dentist, but i'm not exactly convinced of teeth.

henry just spent several weeks screaming in my arms as his two bottom toofers pushed up through his bone and broke through his thin pink skin. we spent hours on the porch rocking and rocking and rocking (watching my impatiens, which i must say, are absolutely stunning) while the sparrows looked at me in mock sympathy. nothing could comfort henry. nothing. not even tastes of sweet sticky cherry tasting tylenol from a dropper. not even the songs i sang while dangling the stuffed red monkey above his fingers. not even when i just held him on my lap and cried too: crying for him, crying for me, crying for the hours my own mother must have spent crying with me.

what's so bad [really] about a liquid diet?

real estate

funny how our dreams constrict over time.

i used to dream of living in a tree house. it would have a secret entrance, a rope swing, a lookout -- you know, the works. my bedroom would be underground (hobbit-style) accessed only by an elevator hidden inside the trunk of the tree. the cozy earthen walled bedroom would have two canopy beds: one pink and frilly, and the other mint green. the mint green would be mine, and the pink for unexpected sleepovers. i saw both of these frothy wonders in the jc penny catalog and spent hours with that lug of a thing on my knees, envying.

now with the real estate market (do people who write "the real estate market" dream of canopy beds?), i dream of a mobile home. yes, a double wide manufactured siding covered mass produced thing where i can lay my head. i've found the perfect one. [click here for a peek.]